


Music for Keith

by Sassassin



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: #1 space dad, Gen, I love keith too, I love shiro so much that my tags on this keith fic are mostly about shiro, Music for Cats, actually sounds really cool, and shiro just wants some coffee after an all-nighter battle poor shiro, bae of marmora, the paladins prank keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 02:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11326917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassassin/pseuds/Sassassin
Summary: A crack fic inspired by Music for Cats, an album with music that was composed specifically for cats to enjoy!  Pidge found a flash drive with cat music files on it on the trash nebula, and Hunk, Pidge, and Lance wonder if Keith might like Pidge’s new music.





	Music for Keith

**Author's Note:**

> [Here](http://www.musicforcats.com/) is the Music for Cats website! [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ7rs6cx5iA) is a video of cats listening to some of the songs, and [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbSReFD5oQI) is a cat listening to Lance's ~~favorite~~ least favorite song, Spook’s Ditty.
> 
> The paper that Pidge refers to is: Snowdon, C.T., Teie, D., and Savage, M. (2015) Cats prefer species-appropriate music. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2015.02.012. (Googling the DOI leads you directly to the paper.)
> 
> There don't seem to be pronouns specified for Pidge on the VLD official website, so I used they/them/theirs.
> 
> Enjoy! :D

Keith yawned and arched his back, stretching his arms over his head and leaning back into his chair in the castle control room. Everyone had been up all night fixing weapons and working on repairs around the castle after their battle with Haggar’s latest ro-beast.

“Don’t you think he looks like cat?” Hunk whispered in Pidge’s ear.

Pidge elbowed him playfully. “Stop it, Hunk.”

“Seriously, though! He looks like a cat when he stretches!”

Pidge looked across the room towards Keith, who had started polishing his Galra blade again in its longer awakened form.

“Well, he does like to hone his claws, I guess…”

One of the doors on Keith’s side of the room slid open, and Shiro walked in sipping coffee from his favorite #1 Space Dad mug that they got him from the space mall for his birthday.

“Pidge, Hunk, how are the repairs going?”

“We’re almost done!” Hunk replied. 

“Yeah, we just have to download my new software patch, and all of the workstations will be good to go,” Pidge affirmed.

Shiro gave them a thumbs-up and then started talking to Keith.

Pidge looked back at Hunk and grinned deviously. “Excellent, a distraction!” 

Hunk raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Yeah, what do you mean?”

Pidge and Hunk jumped. Lance had walked in behind them unnoticed in his pajamas and fuzzy blue lion slippers.

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you.” He sat down next to Pidge on the arm of their chair. “A distraction for what? Are pranking Keith? I’m in!”

Pidge pushed their glasses up their nose, and the lenses glinted. “Hunk has a hypothesis that Keith’s Galra traits might include catlike behaviors, and I just got an idea for testing it out.”

Lance looked at them skeptically. “Because the Galra look like Earth cats?”

“And space lions!” Hunk added.

Lance paused to consider the idea for a moment. 

Hunk grabbed Lance’s arm and pointed towards Keith. “See?”

He was drinking a glass of milk, which they obtain daily from Kaltenecker and pasteurize in the castle kitchen. 

“So…” Lance looked back at Hunk. “He’s drinking milk.”

“Yes!” Hunk said excitedly.

“But we drink milk all the time.” 

Shiro finished what he was saying to Keith, and they clasped hands in some kind of agreement. Then Shiro walked away towards the kitchen, sipping more of his coffee.

Pidge’s eyes widened, and they patted Lance’s shoulder. “Look again!”

Keith was patting the cushioned seat of his chair with both hands.

Lance squinted. “Is he… _kneading_ it?”

Keith yawned and curled up in a perfect circle on the seat of his chair to take a nap.

“Ok,” Lance grinned at Pidge and Hunk. “He’s a cat.”

“So what’s the plan?” Hunk asked Pidge. “Are we giving him a box? There are some big ones in the kitchen in the recycling bin.”

“No!” Pidge laughed. “I have something even better!” They logged onto their workstation, and Lance and Hunk looked over their shoulder. They opened a folder of music files, plugged their headphones into the headphone port, and handed the earbuds to Lance and Hunk. “When I was on the trash nebula, I found an Earth flash drive with cat music on it! It was amazingly preserved, probably because Kingston put an extra-durable metal casing—“

“Pidge,” Hunk tapped them on the shoulder. “What is cat music?”

“Ah!” Pidge opened a PDF file in the flash drive. “This is a paper from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that investigated whether the music that a University of Maryland professor composed for cats elicited more positive responses from cats than human music from Fauré and Bach.”

Hunk and Lance stared blankly at them.

“Which means,” Pidge beamed, “that cats might have different sound and music preferences than people do, and we can see if Keith likes this music too!”

Hunk and Lance looked closer at the music files on Pidge’s screen. 

“So, which ones do you think we should try?” Hunk asked. “Cozmo’s Air? Spook’s Ditty?”

“Ugh, I can’t listen to Spook’s Ditty for very long, so let’s try Rusty’s Ballad instead.”

Lance’s eyes widened. “You listened to all of these?”

“I was so bored on the nebula! I had to do something, otherwise I would have gone crazy from loneliness,” Pidge said.

“What do they sound like?” Hunk asked.

“Hmmm…” Pidge crossed their arms while they thought back to their listening experience. “Some are like deep-sounding string music with some high notes and purring sounds. And Spook’s Ditty had faster and higher-sounding piano music with birds tweeting.”

Lance put an earbud into his ear. “Turn on the Spook’s Ditty one, that one sounds cool.”

Pidge turned to Hunk. “Do you want to listen to that one too?”

“Sure!” Hunk said. Pidge pressed play.

***

When Keith woke up around 30 minutes later, they decided to just give Keith the entire flash drive and observe how he reacted to all of it. Pidge and Hunk would be the ones to show the music to him to avoid Keith being suspicious of it due to Lance’s involvement.

“It’s a sample size of one and without any controls, so it’s not a real study,” Pidge said. “But it’ll still be interesting!”

Lance snickered. “I still think we should have woken him up with Spook’s Ditty.”

Hunk and Pidge approached Keith at his workstation with the flash drive. Lance peeked from around the corner of a nearby hallway and put his hands to his face to keep himself from laughing. 

“Hey Keith!” Hunk said.

“Yeah?”

“Pidge found some music in the trash nebula, and we want to know what you think of it. ‘Cause you like listening to music a lot.”

Keith took the flash drive. “Are you sure it’s ok to put this in my computer?”

Pidge nodded. “Yeah, I was able to listen to the whole thing in the green lion, and it didn’t detect any viruses.”

“Ok.” Keith put the flash drive in his pocket. “I’ll listen to it in my room later.”

“Sounds good!” Hunk said. Pidge and Hunk then walked as normally as they could towards Lance’s hallway while Keith exited the control area, probably to go put the flash drive away in his room. When they rounded the corner and saw Lance crouching and trying to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible, everyone burst out laughing.

“This is going to be so good!” Lance had tears coming out of his eyes.

“What does the tracker say, Pidge?” Hunk asked. “Has he started listening to it yet?”

Pidge brought out a thin orange rectangular device that looked like a smartphone. “He hasn’t opened it yet, but I’ll let you guys know when he does and which songs he’s listening to.”

Lance gave Pidge a high five. “Brilliant idea, Pidge.”

Hunk put an arm around Pidge’s shoulder. “You’re the best!”

Then they heard footsteps, and they saw Shiro enter the other side of the hallway. 

“Good morning, everyone!” Shiro was still holding his #1 Space Dad mug, probably to refill it with more coffee. He looked down at Lance’s slippers. 

“Yeah, I’ll change out of them soon,” Lance said.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Shiro replied. “Allura and Coran just told me that the signal from Zarkon’s ship is actually growing fainter, so it sounds like we have some time before the next fight.”

“More time to sleep, thank god!” Lance yawned. “Imma go back to bed then—“

“What were you all doing in the hallway though?” Shiro asked. “Did I miss something?”

“No, no, not at all!” Lance said. We were just going to go to the kitchen for coffee.”

A corner of Shiro's mouth turned up. “You mean the kitchen in the opposite direction? The direction that I’m going in?”

Lance’s eyes widened. “Yeah! That kitchen.”

Shiro chuckled. “Really, now... What are you all up to?”

Lance put his finger on his finger on his nose and looked pointedly at Pidge and Hunk.

Pidge looked at Lance and Hunk, who had also put his finger on his nose, and laughed. “Fine, I’ll tell him. Shiro, I found a flask drive of cat music on the trash nebula, and we gave it to Keith to see if he likes it.”

Shiro's eyebrows furrowed. “Cat music," he mused. "Music made for cats?”

Pidge giggled. “I think I found a researcher’s flash drive because it had music composed for cats and a few papers about how cats respond to different kinds of music.”

Shiro stood there for a beat and then started laughing as well. “On a more serious note… Do you think we might be able to use any of this against the Galra?”

“You mean if we can turn it up several decibels as a sound weapon… ?” Hunk wondered.

“Oh, I know! Maybe we can blast out Spook’s Ditty with the blue lion’s sonic boom!” Lance put his hands up in the air to mimic the new weapon.

Everyone stared at Lance. Space crickets chirped in the background. 

“You really like that song, don’t you?” Pidge said. 

“No, I hate it.”

Shiro chuckled. “What does it sound like?”

“Why don’t we go to Keith’s room and listen to it together?” Hunk suggested. “I know it’ll interfere with our ‘experiment’, but I think it’ll be funny, and we can see how Keith and Shiro react to it.”

Pidge started giggling again.

“Ok,” Shiro agreed. “I can see how much you all love this song, especially Lance, so let’s pay Keith a visit.”

Pidge’s giggling increased to full on laughing when they looked at their tracking device. “Keith is listening to the flash drive!”

“Yes!” Lance did a fist pump of success. “Which song is he on?”

“Tigerlili and Mimi’s Mewsical. Emphasis on mew,” they added for Shiro.

“Wow…” Shiro laughed. “What does that even sound like?”

“Let’s find out!” Lance said, and he led the way to Keith’s room.

***

They arrived at Keith’s room, and Lance walked up to the door.

“Yoooo! Shiro wants to listen to Pidge’s new music too, let us in.”

They waited a few moments, but there was no response.

“Are you sure he’s there, Pidge?” Shiro asked.

Pidge looked at their orange device. “That’s a good point. I can’t tell his location. I can just say whether the songs are playing or not and for how long.”

“Here, I’ll knock.” Shiro walked up to the door and began to knock politely, and the door cracked open.

“Um… Keith? Can we come in?” Shiro cautiously looked into the room and then turned around to the others. “He’s sleeping.”

“Aw man,” Lance pouted. 

“Nooo!” Pidge gasped in mock horror. “We can’t determine whether he likes cat music or not if he’s sleeping through it!”

“Maybe another time, Pidge.” Shiro patted them on the shoulder. 

Hunk looked at Lance. “Want to try out the flash drive in the blue lion?” he whispered.

Lance’s eyes brightened, and he nodded. He tiptoed into the room—the fuzzy lion slippers were especially good for this—and pulled the flash drive out of the USB slot of Keith’s computer.

“Later guys!” Lance waved, and Hunk and he headed down towards the hangars.

Pidge looked up at Shiro. “So….”

Shiro closed the door to Keith’s room softly so he wouldn’t wake him. “How about I make some more coffee? Or some of that herbal tea that the Arusians gave us at their celebration?”

“Tea sounds good!” Pidge smiled. They headed to the kitchen together, with Pidge telling him more about their adventures with the adorable fluffy aliens on the trash nebula.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! :3  
> If you’d like, you can follow me on tumblr [here](https://sabretoothed-moose-lion.tumblr.com/).


End file.
